7 Components of Effective Marketing Campaigns

How is marketing effectiveness measured within individual marketing campaigns? A large number of companies never ask this question and an even larger number gloss over this issue entirely.

They jump right in and focus on driving as much traffic as possible through organic and paid search. Unfortunately, driving the wrong kind of traffic to a landing page that is not optimized is a recipe for disaster, not to mention a complete waste of marketing capital. There are some critical components that must go into each marketing campaign; defining these components long before you start is essential to reaching your goals.

It is important to understand that a marketing campaign does not really have an end. It morphs into something new and better. It changes based upon the real-time feedback your company receives. In fact, it is well understood that one successful campaign leads into a series of changes that make the subsequent campaign even better. That is the mindset your team must have moving forward. To help you on your way, here are seven components of effective marketing campaigns.

1. Market Research

Online market research must be supplemented with the knowledge your company gains from the field. Customer-facing appointments, conference calls, and visits provide invaluable insight into what customers want, what they need, and what concerns them most. That data from the field needs to be clarified, segmented, and cleaned so that it becomes actionable. It is no different that enriching your data through your marketing database software.

Your online research can then be used to back up your claims or reaffirm your assumptions from the field. If you have gathered intelligence on your competitor’s activities through face-to-face customer visits, then checking that intelligence online is merely a matter of reviewing how your market and customers see your competitor's strengths and weaknesses. What are the prevailing themes online about your competitor's offer and service levels?

News and recent trends are also an important part of your research. Understanding the impact of emerging technologies or competing solutions helps to clarify whether you are pursuing the right opportunities. Your product development and value proposition all come from your market knowledge, so always be sure to shore up that knowledge with new, up-to-date research.

2. Buyer Personas

Who are you targeting and why? Have you fleshed out your buyer personas and defined why your product or service is the ideal fit for their needs? Again, most companies just launch a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign to increase paid traffic without any idea of whom they are targeting and why. Do not make that same mistake.

Marketing effectiveness comes from a clear understanding of your target audience. However, it is not enough just to identify your target accounts. You need to define how decisions are made, who makes them, and what the most pressing concerns are for the individuals tasked with making purchases.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is not just about optimizing your website. It is not just about revamping a single webpage or making sure the URL is aligned with your company’s name. It is not just about making sure your website is mobile-friendly. It is really about making sure your entire digital marketing campaign is aligned with the keywords, colloquial sentences, and keyword-phrases used by your buyer personas in online search. It is about making sure your website is optimized for local searches and that all campaigns have SEO as part of their design.

4. Attention-Grabbing Content

Your content has to speak to your buyer personas. It has to be aligned with addressing their biggest concerns. It must provide your business audience with verifiable facts, ones that support your arguments and substantiate your claims.

Analytics and data enrichment are keys to optimizing marketing campaigns.

Ditch the elongated text. Your business audience will not read an endless article. They respond to infographics, vivid images, product breakdowns, business whitepapers, customer case studies, and content geared toward market projections and feasibility studies. Your content marketing must be optimized for your business audience. Doing that requires a focus on SEO and a thorough understanding of your buyer personas.

5. Optimized Landing Pages

The only way to convert incoming traffic is by having an optimized landing page. That requires reviewing how users interact with your page. It involves understanding if traffic was organic or paid and it involves defining the click-through-rates (CTR) on both traffic sources. You need to know how much time users spent on your landing page, with what users interacted, on what they clicked, and how they moved about your content. Focus on answering the following questions:

What is your CTR on your content or landing page's call-to-action (CTA) and is that percentage up or down compared to historical trends on past campaigns?

Are you using a simple lead capture form or are you asking customers to fill out too much information?

Have you structured your content around a convincing solution or are customers abandoning pursuit because

your content is too generic?

Driving traffic without an optimized landing page will quickly tank all your efforts up to this point. Converting visitors into leads must become a science, one where your team is always reviewing your landing page and looking for any insight on how to improve your conversion rates. Your analytics provide the answers, but your own data, and your ability to leverage that data, will determine success or failure.

6. Lead Nurturing with Marketing Automation

Keeping your buyer personas engaged throughout the buyer's journey is essential to marketing effectiveness. Every customer action must be met with a response, one in which your content and digital offers push the customer further through the journey until all questions are answered and he or she makes a purchase.

Nurturing your leads means exactly that. Each content piece is an investment. You are planting one seed at a time. Customers that respond to your content and take action are ones who are buying into your message. However, you must have a marketing automation platform that continually feeds your leads with engaging content and hard-to-ignore offers. Marketing automation is the tool, but content is the element that makes the real difference.

7. Data Enrichment and Analytics

Throughout this entire process your marketing database software is enriching your data, making sense of that data, and empowering you to act upon it. Data enrichment helps you improve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It helps you increase your CTR on email campaigns and it improves your content. Your website analytics give you the insight into how each portion of your marketing campaign is performing best. However, it will not help if you are not continually enriching your data and reviewing your real-time results.

An effective marketing campaign begins and ends with research. How you research your target audience and how you research results during a campaign ultimately determines marketing effectiveness. A commitment to research forces you to ask the questions that need to be asked. Continuously enriching your data and making it relevant helps you answer those questions and makes it easier to make educated decisions that improve a campaign's effectiveness.

ReachForce helps marketers increase revenue contribution by solving some of their toughest data management problems. We understand the challenges of results-driven marketers and provide solutions to make initiatives like marketing automation, personalization and predictive marketing better. Whether you have an acute pain to solve today or prefer to grow your capabilities over time, ReachForce can unify, clean, and enrich prospect and customer lifecycle data in your business, and do it at your own pace.